Senior Research Seminar with Dr Kimberly Chong (University College London)

Dr Kimberly Chong (University College London)Balance Sheet Aesthetics and the Racial Contours of Cost

In this paper I analyse a seemingly disparate set of practices – how fund managers in the UK decide what stocks to invest in, and the management of back-office “knowledge factories” in China. You could say that these practices reflect the different ends of financialization – we have stock valuation and selection enacted in Europe and then the consequences of this mode of valuation, the creation of low-cost work in distant lands. Though we should consider, following Appel (2019), that this bifurcation of activity is not incidental, but rather the very means through which certain claims of financialization, like “shareholder value”’ are generated. Building on research that attends to how futures are constructed and invoked in capitalist practices, including work on narrativizations of the future, this paper focuses on a key concept in investment imaginaries - “the balance sheet” – and argues that it is drawn upon by fund managers as a “technology of imagination” (Sneath et al. 2009). I look at how a balance sheet aesthetics – an imaginary of an idealized balance sheet – is materialized, through the differential valuation of race which constitute the terrain upon which financialization is made. The offshoring of service work and the invocation of “flexible labour” is legitimated not by an economic calculus but rather through racial hierarchies that circumscribe the value of persons. Further I argue that categories which are typically presented as purely economic or neutral, such as “revenue” and “cost” (the two sides of the balance sheet) act as racial signifiers within financialized production. In this way, China, even if it is the world’s second largest economy, is still an “emerging market” and a “natural” place to find cost-savings within Western investment imaginaries.